Quotes About Television

The good television of today is probably better than the best television of the old days. The bad television of today is worse. It is not only bad - it is damaging, meretricious, seedy and cynical.

I've got a lot to say about television. There's a lot going on in television right now and I feel like a huge part of television.

It’s not whether children learn from television, it’s what children learn from television... because everything that children see on television is teaching them something.

Television is just the wrong medium, at least in prime time, to teach science. I think it is hopeless if it insists on behaving like television. . . .

All television is children's television.

Somewhere around the turn of the century, it stopped being hip to say you never watched TV. Adults are much more likely to find something to engage them on television than they are at the local multiplex. Edges are being cut on television all the time, but at the movies only now and then.

Television thrives on unreason, and unreason thrives on television. It strikes at the emotions rather than the intellect.

When I first started acting, I had all these ideals about the kinds of roles I wanted to play, but the reality is that when you do television - and I do a lot of television - you get cast for qualities that you have as a person. So I look for qualities that I like to portray.

We didn't have television until I was about eight years old, so it was either the movies or radio. A lot of radio drama. That was our television, you know. We had to use our imagination. So it was really those two things, and the comics, that I immersed myself in as a child.

Television is not the truth. Television is a goddamned amusement park.

I describe television as feminine and movies as masculine, in the sense that television wants to examine a problem from all sides and talk about it for a long time, and movies just want to hit the climax and then maybe have a smoke.

Do I enjoy features? Yeah, I really do. Would I like to do some more features before I head to the barn? Yeah, probably. But I also love television. I love doing television because it's fast, and that I like a lot.

Television is all about sound. You'll never get a moment of silence unless there's something really extraordinary going on, on screen, visually. They never let a moment of silence pass without being filled in television because it's a very sound-driven medium.

She's television generation. She learned life from Bugs Bunny. The only reality she knows comes to her through the television set.

There is some stuff on television that is shocking that it's on there, and shocking that it's not being censored. We run to that with torches and pitchforks and go after it. On Flavor Of Love, when a woman took a dump on the stairs, I mean, that's like J.R. being shot on Dallas, or like maybe the last episode of M*A*S*H. It's a milestone on television that's covered with chlamydia.

Television was first conceived to be used as some kind of telescope, not for broadcasting. Originally, Sworkin, the inventor of television, wanted to settle cameras on rockets so that it would be possible to watch the sky.

I've noticed a lot of people talking about the wealth of roles for powerful women in television lately. And when I look around the room at the women here and I think about the performances that I've watched this year, what I see actually are women who are sometimes powerful and sometimes not. Sometimes sexy and sometimes not. Sometimes honourable and sometimes not. And what I think is new is the wealth of roles for actual women in television and in film. That's what I think is revolutionary and evolutionary and it's what turning me on.

I don't have a television, and I'm just not too up on television.

It takes a pretty strong person, a rather unusual young person, to stand up to ridicule and refuse to give in to temptation. There are so many things today in modern music, on television, and in the movies that portray a life that is nowhere near the life the Lord would have us live. Consequently, we cannot afford to turn to the radio, television, or Hollywood to take our cues about what is right and what is wrong. It is scary to realize that the more we are exposed to Hollywood's version of life, the more we gradually begin to accept it.

I love films, I love movies, I love television, I love television series, I love the internet, I love anything that enhances images. But most of all, I love, love movies.

Television watching should more properly be called television staring; it engages eye and ear simultaneously in a relentless and persistent way and leaves no room for daydreaming. This is what makes watching such an inferior form of leisure

If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive.

I think it's become fashionable for the snobbish egghead today to make fun of television. I've heard many people, boast, "I would never have a television set in my house," well, these people are fools.

I just really like writing and making television shows. There are ego rewards in doing battle with other television programs in prime time in the main season. I suppose there are times when I might look at that and think that's the major league. But when you look at it, ultimately would I really want to gamble my livelihood and my ability to connect with my fan base or write a show that I really like writing, or in some cases direct a show that I really like directing, for the sake of winning an ego battle? It's totally not worth it. That stuff is so ephemeral.

American movie audiences now just don’t seem to be very interested in any kind of ambiguity or any kind of real complexity of character or narrative - I’m talking in large numbers, there are always some, but enough to make hits out of movies that have those qualities. I think those qualities are now being seen on television and that people who want to see stories that have those kinds of qualities are watching television.

Television exposes the world to the accident. The world is exposed to accidents through television.

At network television you could make a show like Freaks and Geeks, and even though 7 million people watch is every week, you were considered a terrible failure, and they got rid of you and staff. Now ... It's like a world where the replacements are the biggest fans in the world. It's, the Elvis Costellos of television are the winners. Creativity is king and it's very very exciting.

The most corrosive piece of technology that I've ever seen is called television - but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.

In a sense, terrorism blossomed in the advent of television. Television promotes terrorism in religion and in politics.

When you listen to Christian radio stations - and there are thousands of them now in the United States - and when you listen to Christian television networks - and there are thousands of Christian television shows across the country - they are all politically right.

The advertising marketplace is moving rapidly into digital videos. We know that by 2018 it is estimated that it will be a $12.2 billion business. We've been seeing the agencies combine their digital video spend with television spend and put it under one spend and just calling it "video." The pool of money is becoming much bigger. The comparisons between television and digital video are being made much more often because you can account for who's watching, you can't fast-forward through the commercials. There's a much more intimate relationship with someone watching digital video.

I think that television lately has been extremely dark and, in some ways, cynical but I also think that people who are writing those shows probably feel exactly as I do - that sometimes the darkness of a story can highlight the light in a story. There's a lot of cynical stuff but I think it may be even more in movies now where you see so many movies about cynical and corrupted characters. That's the state of many movies right now but movies, television, all of culture, there's always going to be a battle between the stories that are cynical and stories that are hopeful.

The arrival of television established a mass-media order that dominated the last 50 years. This is a personal media revolution. The distinction between the old order and the new order is very important. Television delivered the world to our living room. In the old media, all we could do was press our noses against the glass and watch.

There were no competitions on television. The first skating competition I ever remember seeing on television was the 1968 Olympics when Peggy Fleming won.

Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.

I think one of the problems in determining the ending for a television series is that you don't know how long the show is gonna last. Particularly because we were in the unique position of adapting Tom's Perrotta novel The Leftovers, it always felt like the first season was gonna end with the end of Tom's novel, and then we would figure things out from there and look back.

The fans always ask me, 'Is Si that crazy in real life?' and I said, 'No, hey, he tones it down for television.'

Television showrunners are a foolishly optimistic bunch.

What the British seem to like are television historians and naturalists, not public intellectuals. You can't help feeling that's because one supplies narrative and the other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we have a resistance to theory and to theoreticians playing too prominent a role in public life.

A lot of TV is put together by teams, by writing staffs and several different directors. It's a great, very smart way to make television. It's worked for however long TV's been around.

The faultless formulas of television-the ones that last-are simple.

We've been able to watch on our television screens sophisticated weaponry find a building; and we've seen dramatic reports from the front where Pulitzer Prize-to-be winning reporters stood up and declared, the United States is attacked, and all that.

There's something about the evolution of television where it evolved from to the things that we're now watching and loving. It evolved from film writers, film actors, and I think gradually people are easing themselves into the amount of time they have.

I was fortunate to be part of a very successful show on CBS in 1986. I switched to NBC for eight years and through these experiences have gotten terrific insight into television; it's a fascinating medium.

See, I don't watch reality television anymore. I watched a little bit of it for awhile, but I found it turned my soul into a black sludge, and I just did not find it healthy or good for me at all, because I would watch it and be disgusted, disgusted.

[from the television show,"Evade the Question Time"]At the end of the first round, I will award three points to Mr. Kaine for an excellent nonspecific condemnation, plus one bonus point for blaming the previous government and another for successfully mutating the question to promote the party line. Mr. van de Poste gets a point for a firm rebuttal, but only two points for his condemnation, as he tried to inject an impartial and intelligent observation.

You realize after you travel enough that there's some things that, no matter how good you are at making television, no matter how good your cameras are, how well it's edited, there's no way the lenses could have captured the moment, and there's no way you will ever be able to write about it and do it justice.